Featured photo by Ethan Schmidt
Story by Ethan Schmidt
The Tennessee Drivers Union met with six Nashville Metro Council members and a delegate from the mayor’s office Tuesday night at the Glencliff United Methodist Church to discuss improvements to working conditions for rideshare and taxi drivers.
The meeting, attended by roughly 120 members, follows two temporary TDU strikes carried out on Aug. 30th and Sept. 13th., which called on local government authorities to expand the Nashville International Airport’s rideshare lot, provide clean airport bathrooms for drivers, establish a 9 p.m. curfew on electric scooter usage, enact a ban on out-of-state drivers, enforce the city’s existing ban on fake taxis and limit the amount of new Uber, Lyft and taxi drivers.
In a private communication to city officials, the TDU added two additional demands: they want the Metro Nashville Police Department to stop ticketing drivers for double parking while waiting for passengers, and they want the implementation of rideshare pickup areas on the north, south, east and west ends of the Broadway strip.
Six council members and Darren Jernigan, the Nashville mayor’s manager of state and legislative affairs, met with the union to listen to their demands and evaluate what next steps they can and should take.
“One, we are here to support y’all,” Council Member At Large Delishia Porterfield said. “We came here because we want to support you. We came because this is important to us, and when our constituents say, ‘Hey, we have a concern,’ we want to try to solve that problem.”
Thus, while the meeting featured minimal conflict between the local government officials and the union leaders, it resulted in many promises from the government officials to forward the union’s concerns to the appropriate individuals and commissions, and no demands were conclusively met.
“What I want to make sure that you all also understand is some of these things — these are the first time that we’re hearing some of this stuff, so we don’t know the answers,” Porterfield said. “Like, we don’t know the answer to everything. But, what we know is that we can help connect you to the people or the departments.”
In the process, the union leaders and government officials specified the extent to which the local government could address the union’s demands.
A slight contention arose during the meeting when discussing the cap on new drivers. While the union’s demands, listed on their membership contract, says that the “city must put a cap on drivers for uber/black/lyft and taxi,” the local government only has the ability to limit Uber Black drivers, which requires its premium vehicle drivers to obtain the proper certification from the city’s Transportation Licensing Commission.
TDU Interim Co-President Kovan Ali, who represented the union’s concerns for most of the meeting, said that Lyft does not have that requirement. Two separate pages on the company’s website list different requirements for Lyft Black drivers in Nashville: one says that local permitting compliance is only required in Boston, Atlanta, Orlando and Chicago, while another says that Lyft Black drivers in Nashville must obtain special driver and vehicle permits.
Sean Parker, District 5 council member and chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said that while he is concerned about “the possibility that…Uber might drop that requirement” if the commission places a cap on the amount of Uber Black permits in Nashville, he is “happy to enter into dialogue with TLC” on setting a limit.
Jernigan said he would speak to the Metro Nashville Police Department’s central precinct commander, Rickey Bearden, about the fake taxi ban and a new demand from the TDU to end excessive ticketing and harassment from police officers when waiting for more than five minutes to pick up a rider. He suggested that the lax enforcement of the taxi ban may be a result of understaffed police forces overwhelmed by massive crowds in the Broadway Strip, an area where rideshare and taxi services are highly demanded due to its large number of tourists and intoxicated patrons.
“It’s hard for me to speak on behalf of police officers,” Jernigan said. “And this is an issue that I just now learned about, but I’m happy to…to take what I’ve heard back here and give to the—the commander of the precinct and share it.”
Erin Evins, District 12 council member and the chair of the Public Health and Safety Committee, said she is aware of the proliferation of fake taxis around the Davidson County area, especially regarding scammed riders’ testimonies in viral TikTok videos. While she is still taking in information around this issue, Evins said she wants to investigate with her committee on what riders should do if they discover they used a fake taxi service. She also backed Jernigan’s plan to meet with the MNPD central precinct commander.
The demand for a 9 p.m. electric scooter curfew revealed a complete disagreement between Jernigan and Ali. The TDU’s interim co-president listed a number of wide-ranging studies that suggest serious safety concerns for eScooter riders, but Jernigan said that Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s office is still taking in data from various departments before making any decisions on a curfew.
“When we raise these issues to the city officials, whether the TLC or mayor’s office, they always say, ‘Show me the data.’ Well, here’s the data,” Ali said.
None of the local government officials responded to him.
Ali moved on to the final two issues raised that evening: the expansion of the airport’s rideshare lot and bathroom improvements.
“This lot is almost full—always—forcing drivers to drive multiple loops, wasting our gas mileage on our vehicles,” Ali said, requesting the official’s support in pressuring the Metro Nashville Airport Authority to allow drivers to use the cell phone lot as overflow parking until the Airport Authority chooses to expand the rideshare lot.
He said there are only 107 spaces in the lot, where rideshare drivers are added to a queue when they arrive and then must wait for their ride request, sometimes for hours. If a rider leaves the lot, they lose their spot in the queue. When the lot is full, a parking attendant closes the gate, and the drivers have to loop around the terminal until they can park, wasting gas in the process.
“And if you’re doing Uber Black?” Ali said. “Keep it in mind, you have a transponder on your windshield. Every time you go through, you go through under the garage, they’ll charge you a buck fifty. And the city will charge you two bucks. So, $3.50 every time you go around. And that’s also every ride you pick up from the airport, wherever you’re at. They charge us $3.50. $1.50 goes to the airport, $2 goes to TLC.”
The union’s issue with the lot’s portable bathrooms was more straightforward to describe.
“It’s the filthiest place you can ever go to,” Ali said. “We have, I believe, five portable bathrooms. And they are nasty as they can be. We have a lot of female drivers that cannot go to those bathrooms. They do not come to the airport because of that.”
The crowd of drivers broke out in thunderous applause.
After much deliberation about the union’s previous communication attempts with airport officials, whether they contacted the appropriate group of airport officials and the effect of drivers waiting in the lot for more profitable rides, the council members advised the union to appear at the Metro Nashville Airport Authority’s public meetings and provide public comment. Additionally, they offered to connect them with the appropriate officials with the Airport Authority.
That meeting might be more contentious than the one on Tuesday. Last night, the TDU tweeted snippets of a Wednesday Nashville Banner article that featured responses to the union’s demands from the Airport Authority’s CEO, Doug Kreulen.
Kreulen revealed the airport has been pushing the rideshare companies to take responsibility for the parking lot. If they don’t, the drivers could lose the lot altogether and will have to park elsewhere. Further, the CEO accused the drivers of ruining everything that the airport gives them.
He even said the Airport Authority previously directed the drivers to negotiate with the companies—who are not under the same legal obligation to bargain with the union of their independent contractors, according to the Communications Workers of America, and have a history of lobbying against legislative bills that would defend unionizing drivers from retaliation, while waging lawfare against local ordinances that affirm that same right, according to a 2019 Guardian article.
The TDU asked their members and supporters to contact Kreulen and echo their demands.
Despite the challenges that remain, TDU Interim Co-President Arkangelo Wilson was pleased with the results of the Tuesday night meeting.
“I think the meeting was really successful,” Wilson said after the meeting. “We think we got what we want, even though we haven’t got it fully. We got the support from the council members and also from the mayor office. I know sometimes, politicians make promises, and they don’t keep. We are not going to let them off the hook. We got to still follow them.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article only mentioned one demand rather than the two demands the TDU brought to the Metro Nashville Council.
Ethan Schmidt is a reporter for MTSU Sidelines.
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